How PrimaSounds are Different From Music and Sound

By:
R.C.L.

PrimaSounds is a kind of bridge between the tools of Sound and Sacred Music, having some of the characteristics of each.

At one time PrimaSounds appears to have been a well known tool of the Wisdom Tradition. Language and symbols of all kinds are also used. So are music, sounds, dance, plants (drugs), sitting, breath, exercise and other methods. To understand PrimaSounds a distinction must be made between: (1) Sacred Music; (2) Sounds; and, (3) PrimaSounds. All three can be used as "tools of Wisdom" to invoke certain conscious states and vibratory phenomena, but each is different. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The differences must be understood in order to see how PrimaSounds Music differs in a fundamental way from other types of "New Age Music" or sound therapies now re-emerging in our culture.

Sacred Music

Music in the Wisdom Tradition was based first on rhythm; it was the Shaman's drum and rattle. Rhythm can easily induce altered states of consciousness, especially when used in conjunction with dance. Voice must also have appeared at an early stage as an adjunct to rhythm. Music appears to have developed out of the base components of rhythm and voice. Soon melody, and eventually harmony, were added. PrimaSounds Music has none of these - no melody, no rhythm, and even the harmonies are completely different.

At some point in history, music began to develop outside of the Wisdom Tradition. Music took on a secular component, separate and apart from its use as a tool of awakening. It began to be used as entertainment, as a means for community. This "secular music" includes most of the music known today. For many people this is the only dimension of music they know. Nevertheless, Music as a tool of the Wisdom Tradition - Sacred Music - has continued uninterrupted down through the ages. There are many living examples existing today, from the chants of Catholic Monks and Tibetan Lamas, to the Shamans' drums and chants of native cultures all over the world, to the high-tech use of the core essence of Music - Rhythm - in binaural, hemi-synch and related rhythm/brain wave based psycho-technologies.

Sounds

Other sounds, vibrations not in-tune with the primal centers, the chakras, can also be used as tools for awakening. There are many techniques. For instance, sounds are used for attention focusing, or nature merging: becoming empty by use of sounds. Examples include becoming one with the sounds of nature - empty but for the sound of thunder, or one with the songs of the birds, the crash of the surf, etc. Zen meditation sometimes uses these techniques. Other examples are "toning" where you sing a tone (the frequency of which is not really that important), and focus on it, or chant mantras, over and over again to quiet the mind and attune breathing. There are also many high technology uses of Sound. Sometimes they are employed with light technologies, or subliminal methods. But again, this is different from PrimaSounds, which are specially selected tones used in a musical scale.

The most extraordinary and advanced of the Sound techniques involve the resonance effects of sounds. Here highly trained practitioners use sound to create a kind of merger, or resonance bridge, between themselves and the object of the sound being tuned into. This is known as entrainment. For instance a shaman will change his vibratory rate to that of a patient being healed by use of sound. Having tuned into the sick person, and located the dissonance causing the sickness, the Shaman uses sound to try to re-tune the bodily organ.

Shamans are also reported to use sounds for other "magical" effects - to tune and transform into an animal, or plant, or have some type of control over them. An eagle may have one vibratory rate, a crystal another. Each person is supposed to have their own unique signature tone, the overall vibratory rate of that person. It is a kind of summation tone which allows entrainment with other entities. Shamans who do sound work learn how to tune into and affect the vibrations they find around them. Unlike PrimaSounds, they do not focus on the chakra tones alone, and do not necessarily use any kind of musical scaling. The Shaman finds and sings, or uses an instrument to play, the overall frequency of another thing, or being, human or otherwise. In that way, the Shaman can touch and influence the world around him by his incantations.

Obviously, we have much yet to learn about these advanced Shamanic Sound traditions. Most of them are still kept secret. They are only revealed in an initiatory process with long apprenticeships. From what I can tell, however, none of these Sound techniques focuses on the chakra or primal tones alone. Moreover, they do not make a scale of special music out of the "signature" sounds. Instead, they make a kind of incantation which is closer to a magic language than a musical scale. PrimaSounds is based on a musical scale, and on resonance and entrainment. Thus it is a kind of bridge between the tools of Sound and Sacred Music, having some of the characteristics of each.

PrimaSounds

PrimaSounds are specially selected air vibrations, in other words, specific tones, that are tuned to the key centers of the human energy system. PrimaSounds as a tool of Wisdom is different from other Sound work in that only the select chakra frequencies are used, and they are used in octaves and scales. PrimaSounds employ a very narrow spectrum of sound energies and require very precise reproduction of particular frequencies. Most other sound work employs a broad spectrum, and accurate reproduction of precise frequencies is not that important. As will be discussed later, the requirement of very accurate tone reproduction places a limitation upon the proper use of PrimaSounds and related technologies, a limitation not present for the use of Sacred Music or most Sound work.

As far as we know, unlike Sacred Music, the use of PrimaSounds as a musical tool of Wisdom did not survive into the modern world. This is unfortunate, since we now know that listening to these select tones without rhythm, melody or normal harmony - pure tones - can have as profound an impact upon human consciousness as Sacred Music. The effect depends upon the tones having a frequency - rate of vibration - which is in tune with the vortex centers of the Human energy system, and other factors. In some ways, as will be shown, these in-tune tones - PrimaSounds - can be even more effective than Music (sacred and secular) in inducing Wisdom consciousness. These primal centers of energy, the soul, or as the Chinese say, the "Chi" of a person, are called the seven chakras in the Wisdom Traditions of India and much of the rest of the world. Other Wisdom Traditions (such as in China or Africa) refer to the five energy centers, or ten energy centers. As will be shown in later chapters, the discovery of the five tone PrimaSounds scale allows us to easily reconcile the different traditions, and the different number of energies found in each, that is, 5/10 energies, versus 7.

We speculate that the earliest Neolithic people who achieved Wisdom, that is, who had peak experiences and began to make sense of their lives, would have noticed the vibrational component inherent in such spiritual realization. It would have been natural for them to help others achieve the state of Wisdom by singing or playing the new vibrations which they felt in their heightened states of awareness. The elders would have tried to help others through the Shamanic initiation processes by humming the new vibration doorways they felt - the PrimaSounds.

They would have quickly discovered that it is possible to directly induce a state of consciousness in another initiate by direct vibration alone, by pure tone. The five tone octave scaling of these tones would also have been obvious. They would have discovered that with PrimaSounds music it was not necessary, and could be counter-productive, to use rhythm and melody. External rhythms, and melodies, interfere with the process and inward journey. Further, they would have limited the use of other sounds and tones because vibrations outside of the five-fold scale are out of tune with the Chakras, and produce other, different resonance effects. The distinction between PrimaSounds (select tones in scale), Sounds and Sacred Music, would have appeared quickly and naturally in the Wisdom Tradition.

For early Man, PrimaSound tones would have been produced primarily by the voice, but also by instruments such as conch shells of different sizes, or bamboo flutes, or even termite eaten branches - such as the "Digeridoo" of the Australian aborigines. Later more high tech tone generators such as the tuned string must have developed. Still later the tuning became even more exact (but still not precise), and virtually permanent, with cast metal objects, such as "singing bowls," bells and gongs.

In the Wisdom Tradition the elders who had achieved Wisdom - a state of Enlightenment or communion with the spirit world - were the only ones who knew the special tuning for the voice and instruments. Only the few elders successfully trained in the PrimaSounds tradition could verify in their own being whether the correct tone was being sung or played. Only they knew the exact tones, the particular frequencies which would work to induce particular states of consciousness in others. The scant traces and records remaining suggest they kept this knowledge secret, and only transmitted the tones through an extended process of initiation. A lifetime of study and practice with an elder wise person was the only way you could learn how to reproduce the exact PrimaSounds at will.

In spite of the creation of instruments, this was a fragile knowledge. Unlike Wisdom work with Sound or Music, in order for PrimaSounds to be effective, the tones had to be exact, with a very small tolerance for error. When an elder died without transmitting this knowledge, it was lost. The instruments might remain, so might the five tone scale, but without the realized Being who knew the exact tones, the students could not play them properly. These instruments produced a range of frequencies, and only the master knew how to play just the right tone. They had no tuning forks to preserve the exact PrimaSounds, although the jade and stone chimes used in the Orient could be fairly accurate.

Further, it appears that the physics, mathematics and technology had not progressed sufficiently to know the numbers of the frequencies of the PrimaSounds. From time to time the exact tones would be lost. Slowly the five tone scale would go out of tune. The intervals in the scale would change too, usually to equidistant spacing. Other tools of Wisdom, rhythmic music for instance, proved more enduring, and thus more effective as a cultural force. So too did work with Sound alone, such as mantra.

Although there are many examples today of sacred Music and Sounds, the transmission of the precise chakra tone scale appears to have been lost almost everywhere. Certainly this was completely unknown to modern Western culture until Arnold Keyserling's work. By the twentieth century only bits and pieces of the PrimaSounds tradition remained scattered in different esoteric Wisdom Traditions around the world.

The knowledge must have been widespread in the past. This would account for all of the legends, and the predominant usage of five tone scales in native cultures. Still, the intervals and tuning of these pentatonic scales are pretty haphazard. Further, the pentatonic scales are used for musical purposes, not resonant vibration work. Although a few Wisdom Traditions remaining still use sound resonance and Sacred Music, none seem to still know the exact PrimaSounds scale. The knowledge of the five tone scale as a chakra resonator had to be rediscovered by Professor Keyserling. As we will see in Chapter 13 on music theory, his discovery grew out of a little known musical anomaly - the acoustic seventh.